A Failure of Democracy: A Current Postscript English Education at the start of the 21st Century[1] John Abbott, in a discussion with his assistant of five years Jim Robinson, reflects on the political and philanthropic landscapes, and the rise of globalised solutions… Jim Robinson (JR): I came to work with the Initiative in September 2010, […]

Profound truths are often so unsettling that people lose themselves in lengthy explanations that ultimately confuse, rather than clarify. This is a very human trait which starts as the youngest children begin to form straightforward explanations as to how they see ideas fitting together. But unless they replace such earlier ‘naive’ explanations as they […]

As 2006 ended I recognised the need to collect all the ideas and experiences I had gathered from research, and everything I had learnt from discussions around the world since publishing the Policy Paper (1998), by explaining what I meant by ‘overschooled but undereducated’.

The start of 2001 was a time of excitement. Personally I had started to feel confident that, after the traumas of 1999 the initiative was building a firm base on which to push these ideas across the UK, and maybe elsewhere.

Over the course of many lectures given between 1993 and 1994, the conflict between what Education 2000 was recommending, and the increasing pressure to work to the prescriptive requirements of the National Curriculum, encouraged the Trust to define learning as … “a reflective activity which enables the learner to draw upon previous experience to understand and evaluate the present, so as to shape future action and formulate new knowledge”.